There are a little over 7 billion people currently in the world, by 2050 there is expected to be 9 billion; all of them will need feeding but we don't yet produce nearly enough food to meet that demand. There are several ways we can try to square this circle; we can create more agricultural land by clearing forests or wetlands; we can change what we eat so that we eat less energy intensive foods, i.e. less beef, more chicken and grains; or we can try to force the land to give us more of a given produce per acre. The reality is that we'll probably end up doing all of these but one that I'm particularly interested in is producing more food from a given area of land, and specifically by using genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
Attitudes to GMOs vary quite widely across the world but for some reason there seems to be a particularly strong resistance to the concept in much of Europe. France and Germany both have blanket bans, as do Austria, Hungary, Greece and Bulgaria and the Scottish Government has just recently come out against all GMOs. Other countries allow them but have such stringent regulations as to effectively ban them. Spain is a rare outlier where 20% of their maize is GMO. Even where it's legal any food set for human consumption must be labelled as GMO if it contains more then 1% GMO ingredients.
All this makes zero sense to me. The scientific case for the efficacy and safety of GMO food is now overwhelming. The argument against it consists of nothing more than an ad hoc mixture of anti-science/anti-intellectualism, a supposition that large biotech companies are somehow evil and the Natural Fallacy. To be clear, there is nothing 'natural' about the crops or animals we currently eat. They have been selectively bred for thousands of years to an extent that if you saw the original cultivars you simply wouldn't recognise them. If a man in tweed with dirt under his nails lets two animals get jiggy on their own all of their genes are mixing randomly, like shuffling a deck of cards; this is apparently okay and safe (which, indeed, it is). If a man in a white coat very precisely selects one gene with a specific function and splices it into the exact position in the genome he wants this is apparently a 'frankenfood' and will lead to the demise of the universe.
A case in point. There is a GMO called Golden Rice. It was invented by a pleasant man by the name of Ingo Potrykus whom I had the pleasure to meet whilst at university. He found a way to express the genes needed to make Vitamin A in the grains of rice. Understand that these genes are already present in rice but they are normally only expressed uselessly in the inedible leaves. This GMO is significant because Vitamin A deficiency is a huge problem in the developing world, especially in Asia where 500,000 children are left blinded every year. Potrykus teamed up with the biotech company Syngenta who invested heavily in developing ever better lines. The best performing crops, along with all relevant patents were then donated, for free, to the Golden Rice Humanitarian Project. The sole aim of this non-profit organisation is to give away, completely free of charge, seeds to the worlds poorest rice farmers who will be free to grow, harvest, sell on and reuse the seeds in whatever way they see fit.
It's a win-win, it really is. So it is especially galling to know that not one person has yet been helped by this new crop. It has taken well over a decade merely to get countries like India, Vietnam, the Philippines and Bangladesh to even allow trials to begin. This process has been fought tooth and nail at every step by organisations like Greenpeace who, to this day, continue to stand against Golden Rice. Their position is, frankly, despicable. Millions of children have been left to go blind because people in high places listen to scaremongering and ideology over logic and reason. This makes me sad. Fortunately, it should only now be a few more years until Golden Rice is approved in many developing countries and millions of people will very quickly feel the powerful benefit wrought by good science and genuine altruism.
Anyway, I appear to have gone on a rant instead of covering the article I wanted to mention; I'll come back to it tomorrow. And if you want to help, drop your local politician an email and tell them to listen to the scientists and start saving lives.
A case in point. There is a GMO called Golden Rice. It was invented by a pleasant man by the name of Ingo Potrykus whom I had the pleasure to meet whilst at university. He found a way to express the genes needed to make Vitamin A in the grains of rice. Understand that these genes are already present in rice but they are normally only expressed uselessly in the inedible leaves. This GMO is significant because Vitamin A deficiency is a huge problem in the developing world, especially in Asia where 500,000 children are left blinded every year. Potrykus teamed up with the biotech company Syngenta who invested heavily in developing ever better lines. The best performing crops, along with all relevant patents were then donated, for free, to the Golden Rice Humanitarian Project. The sole aim of this non-profit organisation is to give away, completely free of charge, seeds to the worlds poorest rice farmers who will be free to grow, harvest, sell on and reuse the seeds in whatever way they see fit.
It's a win-win, it really is. So it is especially galling to know that not one person has yet been helped by this new crop. It has taken well over a decade merely to get countries like India, Vietnam, the Philippines and Bangladesh to even allow trials to begin. This process has been fought tooth and nail at every step by organisations like Greenpeace who, to this day, continue to stand against Golden Rice. Their position is, frankly, despicable. Millions of children have been left to go blind because people in high places listen to scaremongering and ideology over logic and reason. This makes me sad. Fortunately, it should only now be a few more years until Golden Rice is approved in many developing countries and millions of people will very quickly feel the powerful benefit wrought by good science and genuine altruism.
Anyway, I appear to have gone on a rant instead of covering the article I wanted to mention; I'll come back to it tomorrow. And if you want to help, drop your local politician an email and tell them to listen to the scientists and start saving lives.
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